yew coffee tables

[Mike Dempsey]

I recently made these 3 tables from a yew I milled about 3 years ago. They are for a mate's wife's 40th birthday present. She is a musician and her instrument is the clarinet.

I laser engraved 3 pictures and a birthday greeting on the sides of the legs.

The 2 small tables fit under the larger table and will be placed between their armchairs. As his wife is 40, I looked for a 1972 coin to inset in resin, plugging a 50mm dia hole in one of the planks. Buying one was harder than I thought, as decimalisation was in 1971 and the only coins minted that year were for collectors sets. However I managed to get a 10p piece on Ebay and duly set in in the resin. The resin dried a little cloudy but the date can still be seen on it. The last photo is of the three tables next to the tree stump where the yew once grew.

He gave her the tables early and I believe they were very well received, and he wont now have to spend his days off getting dragged around Ikea etc looking for coffee tables!

[Tony Croft aka hamadryad]

well thought out pieces, she will be delighted!

 

you know all the best folk are fourty this year! 1972 was a vintage year

[stevie-b]

well thought out pieces, she will be delighted!

 

you know all the best folk are fourty this year! 1972 was a vintage year

 

I was thinking the same thing!

 

Cracking tables mate. The laser engraving looks class, how do you do that, apart from "with a laser"!

[Mike Dempsey]

with a very expensive laser worth about 18K. Obviously connected to a computer, using Corel draw to work on images, exported to the laser engraver software, and then fed to lasser via fibre optic cables. Plain words etc can be directly worked in the engraving software and fed to the laser. I can engrave up to 1000dpi in a variety of materials, but wood is the best and I normally engrave at 300dpi in wood.

Although I can onlyengrave a max size of about 200 square I have made a variety of jigs whereby I can do that size in the middle of a larger piece of timber etc.

Its a pretty cool toy which soon paid for itself and it is definetly far superior to the cheap chinese rubbish which is available now. Its also the only method to engrave on timber as there is a colour differential between engraved wood and wood which hasnt been touched (as opposed to cnc routing) and you can also do sharp edges with a laser which you cant do with a cnc router. The photograph below is of the laser actually engraving one of the images. The small yellow dots are the laser hitting the wood and burning it

[Mesterh]

Table looks brilliant and nice info on the laser.

[delabodge]

nice mate,,,,

[stevie-b]

Cheers for the laser info, an awsome bit of kit:thumbup: